“Taxi Driver Strikes Pedestrian Who Fell Down Crossing Sixth Avenue Against the Light in Soho”

its a sad incident, no need for a misleading headline with an obvious agenda

Larry Littlefield

“Frequently, firms submit a bid below the expenses they expect the job will incur — just to secure the contract. They then go on to boost their bills — often by 20% or more — with last-minute work changes, claims of delays and other schemes hiding a project’s true cost. We saw it most infamously with the Big Dig in Boston, where costs went from $2.6 billion to an outrageous $22 billion. But it happens every day, in smaller but still insidious ways.”
So the problem was the bid was 20% too low, and that’s why the cost increased ten-fold? On public jobs, at least, the amount bid has skyrocketed. Change orders are on top of that. The Daily News is kidding itself. It is ignorant of the most important crisis in construction, and is keeping its readers ignorant.

What is going on is excess profits, featherbedding and a lack of productivity and — wait for it — a pension crisis. Like New York State and New York City, the construction unions got deals to retroactively increase their pensions in the stock market bubble. Construction workers are covered by “multi-employer pension funds” that all the unionized construction companies have to pay into and pensions for all the workers come out of.

Once the housing bubble burst and many construction companies laid off and shut down, however, the multi-employer pension funds have far less money coming in. Meanwhile pension payments have been inflated by the retroactive pension deals. That soaring pension burden is shifted to those unionized construction companies that remain in business, causing their costs to soar.

As a result the private sector, more and more, refuses to use union contractors, because to do so is to get socked with the cost of the pension crisis in addition to the cost of actual construction. So the union contractors try to sock it to the public sector instead, making taxpayers (and MTA farepayers) who don’t even have pensions sacrifice to pay for their past deals.

You won’t read about any of this, because both the construction unions and the construction companies were complicit in creating this disaster, and have an interest to keep it quiet so they can shift the burden to the rest of us. If everyone knew what had happened, they’d face a union member, stockholder, and taxpayer revolt. When the Daily News talks about the low profit margins in construction, implies that the problem is prices are too low, and doesn’t even mention the soaring pension costs, it has fallen for the propaganda.

Larry Littlefield

“Frequently, firms submit a bid below the expenses they expect the job will incur — just to secure the contract. They then go on to boost their bills — often by 20% or more — with last-minute work changes, claims of delays and other schemes hiding a project’s true cost. We saw it most infamously with the Big Dig in Boston, where costs went from $2.6 billion to an outrageous $22 billion. But it happens every day, in smaller but still insidious ways.”
So the problem was the bid was 20% too low, and that’s why the cost increased ten-fold? On public jobs, at least, the amount bid has skyrocketed. Change orders are on top of that. The Daily News is kidding itself. It is ignorant of the most important crisis in construction, and is keeping its readers ignorant.

What is going on is excess profits, featherbedding and a lack of productivity and — wait for it — a pension crisis. Like New York State and New York City, the construction unions got deals to retroactively increase their pensions in the stock market bubble. Construction workers are covered by “multi-employer pension funds” that all the unionized construction companies have to pay into and pensions for all the workers come out of.

Once the housing bubble burst and many construction companies laid off and shut down, however, the multi-employer pension funds have far less money coming in. Meanwhile pension payments have been inflated by the retroactive pension deals. That soaring pension burden is shifted to those unionized construction companies that remain in business, causing their costs to soar.

As a result the private sector, more and more, refuses to use union contractors, because to do so is to get socked with the cost of the pension crisis in addition to the cost of actual construction. So the union contractors try to sock it to the public sector instead, making taxpayers (and MTA farepayers) who don’t even have pensions sacrifice to pay for their past deals.

You won’t read about any of this, because both the construction unions and the construction companies were complicit in creating this disaster, and have an interest to keep it quiet so they can shift the burden to the rest of us. If everyone knew what had happened, they’d face a union member, stockholder, and taxpayer revolt. When the Daily News talks about the low profit margins in construction, implies that the problem is prices are too low, and doesn’t even mention the soaring pension costs, it has fallen for the propaganda.

moocow

Yes Fred, he was going to die anyway right? The cab had little to do with the timing,